We are extremely excited and honored to write you that this Sunday
March 7th at 2PM Balagan will present beautiful 35mm prints of the
films of the amazing but little known Armenian filmmaker Artavazd
Peleshian.

This is a UNIQUE CHANCE TO SEE THESE MASTERPIECES of ARMENIAN CINEMA
on 35mm that Balagan has managed for a one-time-only viewing at the
Carpenter Center for Visual Art at Harvard University. Given the
extreme difficulty and cost in acquiring these film prints it is
uncertain when you will have an opportunity to see these spectacular
celluloid works projected on film in the Boston area anytime soon so
please come. Peleshian's works are little known in the US, yet his
images are deeply affecting and his incredible form of editing that he
calls "Distance Montage" is fascinating (read quote below). If you
have any doubts, we urge you to read Scott MacDonald's excellent
article about Peleshian's work in February's Artforum that hopefully
will eventually draw more interest in his works and make them more
accessible to a larger audience.

Discovered to the world by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who
became his first and most ardent supporter, Armenian Filmmaker
Artavazd Peleshian is considered as one of the most important
filmmakers of our time, he received the Scam Prize for Television for
his whole work in 2000. Artavazd Peleshian is also an inventor of
“distance montage”.

Artavazd Peleshian:
"Distance Montage and the effects that it creates evolve like a
sphere. It's not linear, it's spherical. It's in continuous motion. If
I find the system, if I construct it correctly, it will go, it
evolves, and two processes will occur: you will go from the beginning
of the film to the end and there will be a mirror effect; you will
also go the other way. Central elements may never meet each other...
Eisenstein's montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage
creates a magnetic field around the film. It's like when a light is
turned on and light is generated around the lamp. In distance montage
when the two ends are excited, the whole thing glows…"

This screening was made possible by support from the Film Study Center
at Harvard University and the efforts of many at National Gallery of
Art, Washington (Margaret Parsons), Art-Film, Yerevan, Armenia (Melik
Karapetian), and everyone at the Harvard Film Archive. We are grateful
to all for their support.